


lamp-bright fruit

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 12:24:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12704946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: Four times Simon Illyan nearly resigned, and then it was too late.





	lamp-bright fruit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Philomytha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philomytha/gifts).



> Written for Philomytha back in 2013; I only just found it again!

1\. When the Emperor brought him in to explain the procedure, detailed what was going to happen to him as though reciting recipes or troop movements, he had been very calm; and then the journey to Illyrica had been long, long enough for board games with the other officers being sent to have the operation done (the reports referred to them as experimental subjects, but reading the reports gave him palpitations, so he perfected his tacti-go skills and began learning to play chess); and then he had been calm when the doctors and researchers set it all out, what he might expect, what had happened in previous phases of the experiment (there was that word again); and then the darkest hour was before the dawn and in the morning he was calm, looking out of his hospital window at Illyrica's slightly greenish sky and waiting for them to come for him. 

It was on the way to the operating theatre, under some kind of pre-sedation that felt like soft restraint, as though he were on the edge of being terminally not very calm at all, that he decided he wanted to jump off the moving gurney, propose marriage to the nurse pushing it and depart Imperial Service forever, taking himself and his new, beautiful wife on adventures throughout known space. He had got as far as a vertiginous six inches from horizontal, his lips forming into _nurse, listen_ – before he quite stopped being able to think at all.

(Later, those final days would fade, become something that had happened to someone else, so he would only clearly remember that green sunrise, and meet the nurse afterwards as a stranger.)

*

2\. Of course it made no sense, none at all. The changeover from a ferociously able and fair-minded Imperial Regent to the tentative rule of a young Emperor in his own name was no relief to a Chief of Imperial Security. Quite the reverse, in fact, as those who'd never dared try anything suddenly dared try anything, and Simon's desk, obsessively neat for the most part, was getting a distinct layer of clutter. 

But Simon was working late, glancing at reports so the text would be in his memory for later cross-reference, and thinking about his grandfather, who had had a market garden in Vorkosigan's District, growing potatoes and carrots with citrus fruit under glass. Gregor, he was thinking, could hardly do a worse job than his father had; Simon's grandfather had done the best job he could, turning over soil with a bent trowel while the Cetagandan ships streaked light overhead up into the hills. Simon ordered up the title deeds for the land just to see his own name written in his grandfather's cramped, shaking hand, and then left them sitting on his desk, balanced precariously between in-tray and out-tray, and they was still there, five or ten minutes later, when he got to the subsection of the current report entitled "Count Vordrozda, his influence". 

(When they let him out of prison he got a small tree in a pot, and it wilted and griped in the heat and windowlessness of his office, but fruited nevertheless, so two weeks out of the year he could sit at his desk and smell lemons.)

*

3\. "Please tell me," Simon said, very carefully, "that the business of Imperial government was not just brought to an entire standstill because an eleven-year-old child gave his foster-brother, the _Emperor_ , a birthday present that ticks." 

"It was his birthday," said his agent on the scene, helplessly, "and it was what he asked for."

(It was an old Earth pocket watch, with real clockwork; Gregor loved it.)

(It was Simon's birthday, too.)

*

4\. And then Miles was missing, and it was, because it didn't matter what anyone told him when he had an inner certainty as steady as a star, his fault. And he thought about resigning a lot during those strange blurred days, but particularly in the morning, seized with traitorous hope even as his rational mind pointed out that if there had been good news overnight, they would have woken him. He insisted on taking the news, the non-news, to Cordelia and Aral personally, wishing for _personal_ rather than personally, as though he could carry that news as a friend. 

(Later, Miles was dead, not missing. He gave the news to Cordelia and Aral with his hand on his insignia, sharp-edged beneath his fingers, metal at his throat.)

*

5\. He'd been raised to mind his manners. _Stop fidgeting, Simon, and look people in the eye_. After the funeral, he was drawing patterns in the scattered earth with his toe, talking into the ground, but Alys was kind; he remembered as from a great distance that she loved him, and was grateful. 

"You know," he said, presently, "I used to be the luckiest man in the Empire."

"How was that?" she asked, gently. She was so close he could smell her perfume, a comfort in the bleakness.

"I only had to do one thing, and I would be free." He shrugged, a little helplessly. "Other men had such variegated responsibilities, such intricate ties. I wasn't even commissioned, it was a political appointment. I could sign my name to my letter of resignation, pre-drafted, and I could take a jump-ship to – well, to anywhere."

"You never did," Alys said. 

He looked up at her and smiled. "No. No, I never did."

"Almost as though" – her tone, and her hand cupping his cheek, were delicate – "you had someone holding you here, all along."

"Alys," he said, "I think I have to go somewhere, now. Be somewhere else. I couldn't go alone" – and as a declaration of something it was incoherent, and rough, but she took his hand, and she understood.

(They saw more of the galaxy together than they ever had apart, and on Escobar, under a morning sky, Simon remembered the nurse on Illyrica between two sips of a greenish lime cocktail; he laughed, and told Alys the story, and kissed her, citrus-sweet.)


End file.
